Peakon is an employee engagement application now from Workday (acquired August 2021) which emphasizes getting useful and actionable data from employee surveys, and with that as a goal includes features to ensure all employees are sufficiently included, that surveys do not induce fatigue, and that data is not lost from open-ended responses, all with the goal of ensuring that employees feel heard and are invested in their company.
It's a convenient tool for questionnaires, surveys, and other reasons when you need to get people's feedback. We really enjoyed using this instrument, even though it can be a bit overwhelming at times. Also, it might take some time to create a survey if you have complicated business logic implemented, but that would take some time using any kind of instruments.
Peakon is a great solution whether you are thinking of pulsing your employees weekly, monthly, or even yearly. The solution provides great dashboards, easy reporting, on the fly segmentation creation, and ways to really dive deep into your people data. I think it's a bit expensive for very early-stage companies, so I would love to see them create a startup/early-stage version or pricing because it has become an invaluable tool for any size company.
Peakon looks beautiful and feels very light, which is comforting when you're (potentially) giving negative feedback and feel anxious. The emails are friendly and the survey is super clean.
The surveys are very easy to navigate. You can answer as many or as few questions as you like, skipping forward and backward, and choosing to provide comments when you want. It's low pressure and feels flexible.
The HR department is able to respond to your comments. You can then have a back and forth conversation while remaining anonymous. This really helps employees further explain and contextualize their survey comments without identifying themselves personally.
We have had several moments when we needed the support (mostly it was when we were working on creating business logic for the survey and sometimes things didn't work as we expected them to). The KeySurvey support team was very friendly and helpful via chat and in case they couldn't solve the issue right at that moment, they always came back to us with a solution to our issue
In terms of a business logic implementation, I think KeySurvey had the most extensive features. Granted, I haven't used a paid version of SurveyMonkey, but for our purposes, the customization KeySurvey offered us (implementing our corporate colors, fonts, and logos) was one of the best features and it looked professional. Also, the name "KeySurvey" kind of sounds better and more business-like for clients from enterprise companies.
SurveyMonkey is a great survey tool that also allows responders to stay anonymous, but I think Peakon is more effective for corporate feedback. It offers more reports and analytics specifically for HR and feels more professional. We often use SurveyMonkey for more lighthearted surveys (e.g., what to eat for team lunch) while keeping Peakon for employee feedback.
When we moved to WFH due to COVID, we use Peakon a regular basis to understand what employees are thinking. We lost the serendipity of talking to people during chance encounters in the office, Peakon has replaced those conversations.
We saw an incredible year in spite of COVID, while there are so many internal and external factors contributing to that success, we can see that having engaged and happy employees has an impact on our business. We also see what happens when they are not engaged or happy.